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Comment by duncaen | Hacker News Reader

This is not what happened according to them:

https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/clarifications-hc....

> (4). Once any maintainer of the community responds to the email, indicating “looks good”, we immediately point out the introduced bug and request them to not go ahead to apply the patch. At the same time, we point out the correct fixing of the bug and provide our proper patch. In all the three cases, maintainers explicitly acknowledged and confirmed to not move forward with the incorrect patches. This way, we ensure that the incorrect patches will not be adopted or committed into the Git tree of Linux.

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It'd be great if they pointed to those "please don't merge" messages on the mailing list or anywhere.

Seems like there are some patches already on stable trees [1], so they're either lying, or they didn't care if those "don't merge" messages made anybody react to them.

1 - https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N...

The paper doesn't cite specific commits used. It's possible that any of the commits in stable are actually good commits and not part of the experiment. I support the ban/revert, I'm just pointing out there's a 3rd option you didn't touch on.

Patches with built-in bugs made it to stable: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YIAta3cRl8mk%2FRkH@unreal/.

Here's the commit specifically identified by Leon Romanovsky as having a "built-in bug"

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/8e949363f017

That commit is from Aditya Pakki who I don't believe is affiliated with the paper in question, whose only authors are Qiushi Wu, and Kangjie Lu.

Aditya Pakki is an RA under Kangjie Lu.

We have 4 people, with the students Quishu Wu and Aditya Pakki intruducing the faulty patches, and the 2 others, Prof Kangjie Lu and Ass.Prof Wengwen Wang patching vulnerabilities in the same area. Banning the leader seems ok to me, even if he produced some good fixes and SW to detect it. The only question is Wang who is now in Georgia, and was never caught. Maybe he left Lu at umn because of his questionable ethics.

At least one of Wang’s patches has been double reviewed and the reversion NACK’d - in other words it was a good patch.

I've looked at all of Wang's patches and they seemed to be all good.

The main culprit seems to be only Quishu Wu. He is also the one who wrote the paper.

Also, they are talking of three cases. However, the list of patches to be reverted by gregkh is far longer than three, more than a hundred. Most of the first batch look sufficiently similar that I would guess all of them are part of this "research". So the difference in numbers alone points to them most probably lying.

I was more ambivalent about their "research" until I read that "clarification." It's weaselly bullshit.

>> The work taints the relationship between academia and industry

> We are very sorry to hear this concern. This is really not what we expected, and we strongly believe it is caused by misunderstandings

Yeah, misunderstandings by the university that anyone, ever, in any line of endeavor would be happy to be purposely fucked with as long as the perpetrator eventually claims it's for a good cause. In this case the cause isn't even good, they're proving the jaw-droppingly obvious.

Even their choice of wording ("We are very sorry to hear this concern.") is the blend of word fuckery that conveys the idea they care nothing about what they did or why it negatively affected others.

The first step of an apology is admitting the misdeed. Here they are explicitly not acknowledging that what they did was wrong, they are still asserting that this was a misunderstanding.

> they're proving the jaw-droppingly obvious.

Yet we do nothing about it? I wouldn't call that jaw-droppingly obvious, if anything, without this, I'm pretty sure that anyone would argue that it would be caught way before making it way into stable.

I've literally never come across an open source project that was thought to have a bullet proof review process or had a lack of people making criticisms.

What they do almost universally lack is enough people making positive contributions (in time, money, or both).

This "research" falls squarely into the former category and burns resources that could have been spent on the latter.

>We are very sorry to hear this concern.

..."Because if we're lucky tomorrow, we won't have to deal with questions like yours ever again." --Firesign Theater, "I Think We're All Bozos on the Bus"

This is zero percent different from a bad actor and hopefully criminal. I think a lot of maintainers work for large corporations like Microsoft, Oracle, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc... I think these guys really stepped in it.

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